build to run every night at midnight”, we have set up the performance build to run on a nightly basis,
which is probably enough for a long-running load or performance test.
Figure 6.26. Setting up the performance build to run every night at midnight
All that remains is to configure the build job to run your performance tests. In Figure 6.27, “Performance
tests can require large amounts of memory”, we are running the Maven build we configured earlier on.
Note that we are using the MAVEN_OPTS field (accessible by clicking on the Advanced button) to
provide plenty of memory for the build job.
Figure 6.27. Performance tests can require large amounts of memory
To set up performance reporting, just tick the “Publish Performance test result report” option in the Post-
build Actions section (see Figure 6.28, “Configuring the Performance plugin in your build job”). You
will need to tell Jenkins where to find your JMeter test results (the output files, not the test scripts). The
Performance plugin is happy to process multiple JMeter results, so you can put wildcards in the path to
make sure all of your JMeter reports are displayed.
If you take your performance metrics seriously, then the build should fail if the required SLA is not met.
In a Continuous Integration environment, any sort of metrics build that does not fail if minimum quality
criteria are not met will tend to be ignored.
You can configure the Performance plugin to mark a build as unstable or failing if a certain percentage of
requests result in errors. By default, these values will only be raised in the event of real application errors
(i.e., bugs) or server crashes. However you really should configure your JMeter test scripts to place a
ceiling on the maximum acceptable response time for your requests. This is particularly important if